There is a huge opportunity to use online reviews to grow your business, and in this post I will give you some tips on how to do exactly that.

How to grow your business with online reviews

This is the second episode in a two-part post about using online reviews to grow your business. The previous post, The Impact of Online Reviews, talked about the huge discrepancy between the way business owners and consumers look at online reviews. Close to 95% of consumers trust and are paying attention to online reviews, and less than half of business owners do the same. Less than a third of business owners are proactively managing their online reviews. The post also discussed some of the reasons why business owners are not leveraging online reviews as much as they could.

We also looked at some studies by Harvard Business School, Berkeley, Microsoft, etc. on how much you can grow your business and sales with online reviews. We saw how a one-point jump in your star rating can have a huge impact on your conversion rate and your sales. We also talked about the difference that one review can make in your average star rating if your rating is on the fence.

Even if you get all your business through referrals (which is good), you may not realize how much your online presence—and reviews in particular—are affecting your referrals. Our last post explained why some people are losing referrals right and left because of online reviews.

In this post, we’ll get into some of the details of how to get reviews, best ways to manage online reviews, as well as some specific tips regarding Yelp.

We’ll get to best practices for growing your reviews, managing your reviews, and responding to reviews in a minute. But because of all the questions I’ve gotten about Yelp, I want to address the question of Yelp first.

Where are my Yelp reviews?

A lot of business owners that I talk to—a lot of my clients—have complained to me about Yelp.

You probably are aware that Yelp has a history of lawsuits filed by business owners, and there’s even a documentary coming out about Yelp. The documentary alleges a “mafia style protection racket” being run by Yelp. Now, I’m not suggesting that this is the case. I do understand, though, the frustration that business owners feel. Yelp has some pretty aggressive sales people, and it’s probably true that they may have said some things to business owners to insinuate that they’ll get favored if they advertise with Yelp. But I believe Yelp is genuinely trying to bring some objectivity to the reviews process. I think their approach is misguided in some ways, but I don’t think it’s malicious.

Differences with Yelp

There are ways to deal with these issues on Yelp, and it’s one of the things we help our clients with. Yelp does a few things that are different from a lot of review sites.

First, Yelp has a policy against asking for reviews. If you say to a customer, “Hey, if you like our service could you leave us a review on Yelp?” you are violating Yelp’s terms of service. If Yelp finds out about that, they reserve the right to delete all your good reviews or to remove your listing from their website. I think this is misguided. There is an inherent bias toward negative reviews, because it’s the people that are upset who are more likely to post a review. I believe we need to regularly ask all our customers for reviews to counter that bias.

Yelp has even gone so far as to say that if you’re asking your customers to review you anywhere—Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor, etc., they can terminate your account or penalize you. To me, this is over the top. Yelp should not be dictating the terms of service for other companies’ websites. But anyway, that’s what they say, although I don’t know how they can police it.

Second, another thing that Yelp does differently is that they are really aggressive about not publishing reviews that may be fake. It’s more of a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later policy. Yelp admits on their website that 28% of reviews—almost a third of reviews—don’t actually get published. So the business owners that talk to me are really frustrated, because they’ll see a fake review from somebody who’s not a customer get published on Yelp when it shouldn’t be and three or four really positive, very legitimate reviews that don’t get published and aren’t being factored into their star rating. That’s just really frustrating to people.

I don’t believe that this is deliberate or malicious on Yelp’s part. I believe they’re genuinely wanting to filter out fake reviews. But it doesn’t appear that they’re taking an approach that most people would agree with.

Help with Yelp

So one of the things that we’re doing with our clients is getting them Help with Yelp. This is part of our MoxyBoost Guardian review management program. We help our clients learn how to take those positive reviews that have been hidden on Yelp and are not published and get them published. We’ve looked at some of the factors that makes Yelp label a legitimate review as a fake one, and when you change those factors you stand a good chance of getting the good reviews published. A lot of it has to do with whether the user has a fully completed Yelp profile and how much content they’ve contributed to Yelp.

We also help our customers with how to get fake negative reviews removed. You can flag fake reviews if they violate Yelp’s terms of service, and it’s really helpful to point out what term of service is being violated when you do the flagging.

So we help our customers learn how to grow their Yelp presence without paying Yelp’s advertising fees, because that same money would be a hundred times more effective if invested in a good local SEO program or some other more efficient form of advertising.

The point is that there is a way to manage your Yelp reviews, and there are ways to manage all of your reviews across the major review sites.

Best practices for managing online reviews

So, let’s talk about best practices. Here are just a few tips, in no particular order.

Have a system for asking for reviews.

Now, I know this is not necessarily easy to do. You really have to stop and think about your process and incorporate this into your process and train your employees; but, have a system. Tools can really help. One of the things we give our customers in our MoxyBoost Guardian program is a feedback page and a mobile app. So, they can put in their customer’s mobile number or email address and click a button and the customer gets an invitation to provide feedback. You just make it part of your process. You train your employees to make it part of their process, and every time you serve a client you say, “Hey, can I send you a request for some feedback?” Then our tool takes any kind of negative feedback and sends it directly to you, and if there’s positive feedback, we invite the customer to provide an online review and give them some direction on where to go to do that—because that’s a challenge for a lot of your customers. Even if they want to leave you a review, they may not know where to go or how to do it. So, having tools is good. But having a system and making it part of your process is also important.

Respond to negative reviews promptly and properly.

If you get a negative review, respond to it promptly and politely. Although it may not feel like it, people are doing you a service by providing feedback. Even if it’s feedback that you don’t want to hear, it’s probably something that you need to hear. And even if it’s not something you need to hear, it is probably something you need to address.
The best way to respond to a negative review is to do it politely. In our MoxyBoost Guardian program, we provide lots of sample responses to our clients, and we even have a service where we respond for our clients right away to any new reviews.

If you take the negative review personally, it’s hard to formulate a good response. But if you respond to the review quickly and well, many times you can get customers to modify their negative review. They were posting a review because they’re upset and they want to be heard. When you respond politely and appropriately, they feel heard. Maybe you’ll be able to address their concerns, and you might change that negative review into a very positive one. At the very least, most review sites allow you to respond publicly, and so anyone who’s looking at that negative review can also see that you are responsive and care about customer service. And they can also see your side of the story.
So respond to negative reviews right away, and respond politely, without getting upset. Or, hire someone to monitor and respond to reviews for you.

Respond to positive reviews.

It’s also good to respond to positive reviews. You don’t have to post a thank you to every positive review that’s put up on Google or Yelp or TripAdvisor or Facebook; you can if you want to. But many review sites also allow you to respond privately. You can actually respond privately to both negative and positive reviews. You can respond privately to positive reviews and say, “Thanks for the feedback. I really appreciate your taking the time to leave this review.” You can also respond publicly, and people who are looking at your online reviews know that you’re paying attention, that you’re engaged with your customers, and that you care. So it’s a really good thing to respond to reviews.

Don’t incentivize reviews.

Don’t pay for reviews. Don’t offer people a coupon. It’s not just that you shouldn’t pay for positive reviews or offer a coupon for a positive review, which violates the terms of service on every review site and can get you in trouble with the government. You also don’t want to incentivize people to leave a review. The reviews should be something objective. If you’re providing an incentive, you’re making it less objective and the FTC has something to say about that. So don’t incentivize people to leave a review.

Yes, I know probably a few of your competitors have fake reviews created for them, and it’s frustrating to see those not get flagged. If you want to, you can go and flag them, or have a friend of yours flag them as fake reviews. But don’t go create those yourself. It’s just not ethical.

Watch out for guaranteed minimums

Don’t hire someone who is guaranteeing a certain number of reviews or a certain number of positive reviews, because the only way they can guarantee that is to create fake reviews. Avoid any kind of service that is guaranteeing that you’ll get positive reviews, because I can almost guarantee that they’re creating fake reviews to do that. You just don’t want to deal with those people.

Comply with Yelp TOS

Be aware that Yelp penalizes businesses that ask customers for reviews—at all. It’s not just asking for positive reviews. If you’re asking customers to leave a review on Yelp in any way and Yelp finds out, they can penalize you. You can say that you’re on Yelp, and you can say, “Find us on Yelp.” But you may not want to link directly to your Yelp profile. At a minimum, don’t link to your Yelp profile and say, “Leave us a review.” If you do ask customers for reviews and they are Yelp users, tell them to find your business on Yelp and review it.

How to ask for reviews

Let’s talk about how to ask for reviews. This is one of the biggest things that comes up with my clients. They say, “I don’t know how to ask for reviews. It feels awkward. When do I do it? What do I say?”

People want to share

The thing to keep in mind is that people want to share. Asking for reviews may feel awkward, because it feels like we’re asking people for something. But in reality, people love to share their opinions. They love to be heard. A lot of times they just don’t think about it. They don’t think about posting a review, or they don’t know that that opportunity is there. But they love to share their opinions, and they might be quite flattered that you asked. If somebody’s really happy with your service, they want to repay you in some way. If leaving a positive review is something that they can do for you, that will help you out and help out some future customers, they’re generally happy to do that.

Ask in person

The best way to ask for a review is in person. Especially if somebody is saying, “Thank you for your wonderful service,” or telling you how good your service was, you can say, “That’s great to hear. We do our best to take care of people that way. Thank you so much for providing that feedback.” You can then go on to say, “You know, it’s that kind of feedback that can really help other prospective customers feel more confident in choosing us. So if you don’t mind, could you write what you just said in a review on Google (or Facebook or TripAdvisor or Better Business Bureau, or whatever site you want to send them to). That would be really helpful.”

In the tools that we provide our clients in our reviews management program, MoxyBoost Guardian, we make it easy to link to the top sites that you want people to leave reviews on, and you can use our app to share those links with your customers. But you can also do the same thing yourself and help them know where to go. When they let you know how much they appreciate you, you say, “Thanks for the feedback. That kind of feedback can help other potential customers in deciding to work with us. If you’re willing to share it, it would be great if you could share what you said to me in an online review.” If you have an app or some online tools, you can put in their mobile number or their email and the process is automated. Or you can give them a list of your review sites and they can then write the review when they go back home.

Strike up a conversation

When you’re looking for reviews, it reminds you to keep tabs on your customer service. You can strike up a conversation with clients in your office or store and ask them, “How was your experience?” Don’t jump directly to asking for the review, but if they keep the conversation going and you have the sense that they’re open to it, you can ask at the close, “Well, thanks for the feedback. We love sharing that kind of info with potential customers so they can feel more comfortable choosing us. If you’re willing to share it, it would be great if you could share what you said to me in an online review”

Not in your office or store

Here’s another Pro tip: Don’t have people leave reviews while they are in your office or in your store. Google, Yelp, and all the major review sites know when someone is posting from your office. If customers do post from your office, there’s a high likelihood it will get flagged as fake. So, have your clients go home or back to their own office to leave the review.

Ask over the phone

If you don’t have the opportunity to ask the customer in person, you can also ask over the phone. In the same kinds of conversations, especially if somebody’s appreciating your service or if you just concluded your transaction, you can say, “Have we taken care of everything? How was your experience today?” If you have a sense that they are open to it, say, “Hey, if you wouldn’t mind would you share that in an online review?”

Ask via email

You can also ask customers via email. You can send out an email blast to all of your past clients. Or even better, send a personalized email to your client. It’s much better than a bulk email.

You can also incorporate your request for a review into your email templates, and make it part of all your organization-wide emails. You can have something at the bottom of each email that says “Did you like your experience? Leave us a review.”

You can make this part of your service delivery process via purchase receipts, thank you pages, etc.

Or, if you’ve got some kind of review management tools, instead of asking directly for reviews you can say, “Provide your feedback here.” Then the tools will catch the negative feedback, and if the feedback is positive, it will ask the customer for an online review in an automated fashion.

Vendors and partners too

It’s not just customers that you can ask for reviews. You can also ask your vendors or your partners or other people that you’re doing business with. They might be very happy and willing to give you a review.

Review management tools

I don’t know your situation. Maybe you already have a review management program, or maybe you’re not in a position right now to grow your business with online reviews. But I would be very remiss if I didn’t tell you about our programs. We have a reviews management program called MoxyBoost Guardian which costs less than half a cup of coffee a day. But it’s actually not a cost. It’s an investment, one that could have a huge return on investment for you.

With MoxyBoost Guardian, we’re actually monitoring 50-plus different websites for you every single day, letting you know when somebody leaves a review so you can respond. We also have tools that allow you to solicit feedback from customers and direct them to the right places, the places you want them to go to leave an online review.

We have a step up from the MoxyBoost Guardian program called MoxyBoost Alpha Team, where we are actually managing and responding to the reviews on your behalf. If somebody leaves you a review, we’ll go in and make the response, using your voice and interacting with your customers for you.

I highly recommend using a reviews management program like this, because it’s not about what the program costs; it’s about what it’ll cost you not to use it.

How much will it cost you if you have negative reviews you don’t know about?

How much will it cost you if your competitors have much better reviews than yours?

How much will it cost you to accept 20% slower sales growth than you deserve?

Your potential customers are online searching for you every single day, and I really want them to find you.

One quick request from me: If you are a regular listener of our podcast, or if you found this post useful, or if you’ve been a client of ours, I’d like to ask you for a review. If you could go to Google or Yelp or SuperPages or YellowPages or Facebook—whatever your favorite platform is—and leave a review for Cloud Mountain Marketing, I would surely appreciate that.

Also if you’ve enjoyed this post and found it beneficial, pass it on to others. Feel free to forward the email you received, or send this link to somebody else.

The impact of online reviews on your business

This is the first of a two-part series about using online reviews to grow your business. In this post, we’ll get into some of the reasons that business owners are not leveraging online reviews as much as they could, and look at some studies by Harvard Business School, Berkeley, Microsoft, etc. on how much you can grow your business and sales with online reviews. In the next post, Growing Your Business with Online Reviews, we’ll get into some of the details of how to get reviews, the best ways to manage online reviews, as well as some specific tips regarding Yelp.

Most business owners ignore reviews, and most consumers really pay attention to them. Why is this? Well, let’s talk about some of the reasons why business owners don’t pay that much attention to online reviews.

Insider’s skepticism—The first reason is that many business owners have an insider’s view. They realize that sometimes reviews can be a less-than-accurate indication of how good a business is. At least, many times that’s the experience with their own business. So they don’t trust online reviews as much as the consumers do.

They’re too busy—Another reason is very simple. Business owners are too busy running their business and taking care of customers to worry about online reviews.

They’re a low volume business—There are different types of businesses, with different types of volumes. For example, a restaurant has hundreds of guests a day, whereas a contractor may have only a few clients a month. Or with bigger projects, maybe even a few clients a year. For example, in the past I provided a very high-value service to a small number of clients (although the number of clients that I serve is probably about to change with the availability of the new local SEO programs and reviews management services). Businesses with high volumes of customers have a much easier time getting reviews than businesses with high-ticket, low-volume customers. Thus, with different kinds of businesses, some businesses are much more aware of reviews than others.

They don’t know what’s posted—If somebody has left a review, whether it’s positive or negative, and you don’t know about it, then you don’t have an opportunity to respond. Many times if there’s a negative review, after a few weeks have gone by you really have no idea who the customer was, and it’s difficult to respond. It’s much better if you know immediately when something gets posted.

They don’t know how to respond—If a review has been posted and you’re aware of it, you might simply not know how to respond. Perhaps you’re not sure where to go to respond, or you’re not quite sure what to say, or how to respond to that negative review.

They don’t know how or when to ask for reviews—A lot of times we have really satisfied, really happy customers, but we don’t know how to ask for reviews. We feel awkward asking for reviews. We don’t know when to ask for them; what the right time is.

They don’t know how to deal with negative reviews—Sometimes we business owners don’t pay attention to reviews simply because we just don’t know how to deal with negative reviews. So maybe we just ignore it and it’ll go away.

They’re frustrated because Yelp hides a lot of our good reviews—One reason I hear frequently is that people are frustrated, especially with Yelp. It seems that many business owners are frustrated because Yelp hides a lot of their good reviews. They say “I’ve asked customers for reviews. I’ve had really good reviews left on Yelp, but they don’t get published. So, why bother?” Well, we’ll address that a little bit in the next post.

Business Owners and Online Reviews—The Stats

Here are some statistics that are really important for you and your business. It may sound like I’m just going to throw some numbers at you, but these statistics are really important and could have a big impact on your business.

The percentage of consumers that rely on online reviews has grown from 25% to 50% to 70% to 85%, to now close to 95%. More than 90% of consumers really pay attention to online reviews when they’re making a buying decision.

In contrast, only half of business owners think that reviews are important, and 25% of business owners think that reviews are not important at all.

While 95% of consumers trust or pay attention to online reviews, at least 80% of consumers (whether it’s right or it’s wrong) trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Think about it—8 out of 10 of your customers believe that online reviews are at least as trustworthy as their friend’s recommendation. Nine out of 10 (or more) of your potential customers are paying attention to those reviews.

The majority of business owners do not trust online reviews, while the vast majority of consumers do. Here is another interesting discrepancy:

More than half of business owners think that if they get online reviews it should be on a specialized industry-specific website.

In contrast, most consumers look at Google, Facebook, BBB, and Yelp more than an industry specific website.

And here are some stats from a recent independent survey of business owners.

Almost 90% of business owners do not ask for online reviews. Their customer is happy with the service, but they just don’t ask for the review. At least half the time, it’s because they didn’t think of it. We just don’t think of it at the right moment to ask the customer. If you are actively managing your online reviews, you will have an advantage over 90% of your competitors.

Seventy percent of business owners do not monitor their online reviews, and of those that do, most do not look at more than a few websites a month (out of the more than 50 important review sites).

Two thirds of business owners think online reviews are biased or unfair. Many believe that Yelp (a large player in the review space) favors businesses that advertise with Yelp (even though Yelp advertising is 70 to 100 times more expensive than Google or FB advertising or a well run local SEO campaign). Therefore, they just don’t think it’s worthwhile paying attention to their Yelp reviews.

Now here’s something you might want to just keep in the back of your mind. The next time you’re looking for a vendor, notice how reviews affect you. A lot of times if I ask someone outright, “Do you pay attention to online reviews?” they might say, “No. No, I don’t. Not really.” But when they go out and they’re searching for a plumber when the toilet is broken, they might pay attention to those online reviews a lot more than they think.

So if you think about it right now you might say, “I don’t pay attention to online reviews,” but next time you’re searching for a vendor you might catch yourself doing so. I just want you to notice that, and notice how the reviews actually do affect you in your search.

Reviews affect your referral business

Now, some business owners say “Oh, I get all of my business by referral.” And that’s wonderful. That is absolutely the best and top way to grow your business. However, this is something you really need to keep in mind if you’re dependent on referrals for growing your business.

Eighty percent of consumers trust online reviews at least as much as that personal recommendation from their friend. Here’s what happens. I ask my friend or my neighbor, “Hey, do you know a good plumber?” and he gives me a name. The first thing I’m going to do before I call that plumber is I’m going to look them up on Google. And I’m going to check out their website. And if I type in the plumber’s name in Google and I see some negative reviews, guess what? I’m really going to hesitate about calling. A lot of consumers do this. So you may not think that your digital marketing or your online reviews are that critical in growing your business but they can have a huge impact on the number of referrals you get that are actually calling you.

This is just like Robert, a local contractor, who told us, “I get all my business from referrals.” What Robert didn’t realize was that more than half of the referrals he got were not calling him! People got his name from a friend, but either they couldn’t find him online when they went to look him up later or they found him but they wouldn’t call a business that didn’t have many online reviews or they found a negative review that Robert didn’t know about and decided based on that not to call him. Think about it—fully half of Robert’s business was going to his competition because of reviews.

So here’s the bottom line:

Reviews can really help grow your business.

I’ll give you a couple of different studies that were done. One is from Berkeley School of Business. Another one is from Harvard University School of Business. Another study was commissioned by Microsoft, jointly done with Boston University. A couple of studies were from marketing firms.

A study by two Berkeley researchers published in The Economic Journal found that a half-point difference in the average review rating (the average number of “stars”) increased a restaurant’s chance of selling out its evening seats by almost 50%.

Another study by a marketing firm found that a one-point difference in star rating will increase the click-through rate of people who find you in online search by 10% to 15%. They also found that businesses that had a negative average review rating (one or two stars) got even fewer clicks than businesses with no reviews. So obviously, if you’ve got some reviews, you want the rating to be pretty good.

In the same study, jumping up three points in your star rating will double your click-through rate and presumably will double your business as well.

Another study found a 20% increase in sales from a one-star increase in review rating.

Another study done by a marketing firm found that going from a 2-star rating to a 3-star rating more than quadrupled the number of mobile phone calls generated, and going from a 3-star rating to a 4-star rating doubled that number again! So that means going from 2 stars to 4 stars increased the phone calls on the mobile phone (mobile search) 8-fold.

The joint study done by Microsoft and Boston University looked at hotels, and found that increasing the star rating by one point created a 26% increase in hotel bookings, and the hotels were also able to charge more at the higher demand level. So the hotels with a one-star increase in rating were able to charge more, and still get a 20% to 26% increase in bookings—so their revenues were up significantly.

One Review Can Make a Difference

One review can make a difference in your star rating, and here’s how that works. If your average review rating is 3.24, it will display on most review sites as 3.0. That means even one more 4 or 5 star review can tip your average up to 3.26 or higher and bump you up by half a star. It makes you display as three and a half stars. So one review can make a big difference if you’re on the fence in your point swing.

In our next post, Growing Your Business with Online Reviews, we’ll cover best practices for building your online reviews. We’ll talk about how to ask for online reviews, and we’ll talk about Yelp issues in more detail.

I’d like to close by asking you for a review. If you’ve enjoyed this post, or my other posts and could take 60 seconds to leave an online review, go to your platform of choice (Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc.), look up Cloud Mountain Marketing, and make your voice heard.

If you’re posting things on Facebook and wanting to get business from it, make sure your posts are shareable.

Hi, this is Steve Johnsen and I wanted to share a quick tip with you on how to make sure your Facebook posts are shareable. Sometimes I post to Facebook and it’s something that I just want to share with my friends, so I can use the default “share with friends” option when I’m posting.

Sometimes–actually, a lot of times–when I post things on Facebook, it’s information that I think might be useful to anybody, and I’d like it to be accessible to the public. A lot of times when I’m posting something related to business on Facebook it would be great if when people read it and like it, they would share it with their friends, and then their friends would share it with their friends?That’s the very definition of something going viral on Facebook. When I share with my friends, and then my friends share with their friends, and then the friends of friends share with their friends, it can reach a large audience very quickly.

A good friend of mine posted part of a book she was writing on Facebook yesterday. It was really well written, and I knew it would help her get clients. So, I wanted to share it with my followers on Facebook, but it wasn’t shareable.

If you’re posting stuff on Facebook that you’d like to get seen by the world, here’s a quick tip for you. When you go to make a post on Facebook, in the box where you’re writing your post, at the bottom there’s a little box that says who you’re sharing with: either “Public” or “Friends” or “Friends of Friends” or “Friends Except?” or “Only me” (private setting). What you want to do if you’ve got something you want to share with the world is make sure that you select the Public option. That way, the friends who want to will be able to share it with others.

Here are a few other tips that will also help make your content more “shareable”:

Facebook is reluctant to promote content that links to outside websites. Rather than linking to an external site, have the entire content contained in your Facebook post.

You will be competing with videos, Facebook live, and all kinds of pictures. The more engaging your content is the better! Be sure to at least include an attractive, relevant photo with your post.

(Super hint: Facebook likes to prolong the time that users stay on Facebook. Videos keep people looking much longer than other types of content, so Facebook is much more likely to promote your video than your text post.)

Facebook and Instagram are selective about what they will display in people’s news feeds. If you have some loyal fans that like and share your post, Facebook is more likely to consider your post to be relevant and engaging and share it with others. Otherwise, it’s possible that what you share will not be seen. If you have some fans you know will share, you can tag them in the post.

If you use both Instagram and Facebook, your Facebook followers can see that you have an Instagram post. But they will not be able to access it without being on Instagram themselves. So post the complete content on both Facebook and Instagram separately.

Well, anyone with a computer can get a website online. But just having the right tools does not make you an expert–and there’s a lot more to web design than getting some information online.

Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and today I want to talk about another myth that is very common related to the internet and websites, and that is that anyone with a computer can design a website.

When I started building websites, there was no such thing as web design software. We built everything by typing code into a text editor. Now, there are all kinds of sophisticated software programs to make the web designer’s job easier. And even tools for the non-designer to use to get a website online.

On the one hand, this is a great development and has brought the cost of web design down dramatically. On the other hand, it has given birth to a myth that anyone with a computer can design a website. The truth is, there’s a lot more to web design than getting some information online.

It’s probably true that anyone with a computer now can produce a website. But that is not quite the same as designing a website. And even though anyone with a design program–with the graphic design software–might have the tools to design a website with, it does require some experience to design an effective website.

I would say this: that just having the right tools doesn’t make you an expert. For example, I might have the most sophisticated spreadsheet program in the world, but that doesn’t make me a chief financial officer. The CFO of a corporation needs to have the experience to understand corporate finance, and they need certain training to be able to do a good job of managing the corporation’s money.

In the same way, you can have the right design programs, the software, and the apps. But even though you might be able to turn out a website with it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that that website is designed. I happen to have a pipe wrench and a blowtorch, and I can sweat pipe, but you probably wouldn’t want me installing your sink. You want somebody with the right training and the right experience, so you know that that system is going to work right and not leak for you.

To design a website, I need to know more than how to use my graphic design software. I need to understand the business purposes of the website. I need to understand how the graphic design communicates the message that the corporation wants to communicate. I need to understand user interface design. I need to have some technical expertise so the site can get found by search engines. And I really have to be able to put myself in the mindset of the ideal customer and how they’re going to interact with that website, so I can make the site inviting and easy to use.

You know, it’s interesting, they did a survey of people who held the job title of web designer and they asked them, “What was your previous job title before you were a web designer?” The number one previous job title for web designers across the United States was “graphic designer.” That’s not a big surprise; that’s a natural transition. The number two previous job title for web designers was “waiter.” That’s an indication of how easy it is with the right apps, the right computer software, to turn out a website.

You can buy templates and pre-designed websites and fill in the blanks, and you can have a website in ten minutes, as one corporation famously advertises on TV. That’s a great way to get a placeholder up if someone is just starting out in business and they don’t have a lot of marketing budget. But that’s not the same as web design.

Web design is the major reason why people either stay on a website when they visit it, or they leave the website. The user experience design is something that the application, the graphic design tool, cannot turn out. That’s something that requires experience to create. Not only so, but design is the main reason why people trust a brand or trust a company when they’re visiting a website; or, why they would choose not to trust that company or brand.

It’s all in the design, and those are very subtle things that a piece of software cannot do for you.

Myth: Good design isn’t needed if you’re already at the top of search engine results.

Well, I would say that, actually, both are needed!

Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and I want to talk about this idea that you don’t need good web design if you’re already showing up at the top of search engine results. The reality is that these are two separate things, and actually both are needed.

Using your website to get you business, to get you new customers, is actually a two-step process.

The first step is, you have to get found. When people go online to search for a service provider, you want them to find you. You want them to find your website. But once they click on that link and come to your website, then your website needs to connect with them emotionally and convince them to either pick up the phone and call you, or come into your store location, or fill out the contact form, or however it is that they get in touch with you to start doing business with you.

And that is a function of design.

Good web design makes an emotional connection with people. It causes them to trust you and to trust your brand. It makes them want to do business with you. So actually, you need both. You need to be at the top of the search engine results so that people can find you, and you need good web design to make that emotional connection with people so that once they come to your site, they’re wanting to do business with you.

Absolutely not true. When you launch a website, there are a lot of things that need to happen in order to get your website found by the people that need to connect with you.

Hi, I’m Steve Johnsen, and I want to talk to you today about a common myth related to websites, and that is this idea that if you build it and launch it, they’re going to come to you. Well, many, many business owners have discovered that this just isn’t the case.

Now, we all know that this is not true in the offline world, but somehow we imagine that it’s going to be true in the online world, that all I need to do is get my website built and launched and then automatically I’m going to have people finding it and get customers from that website.

Your website is just a collection of files that sits on a computer somewhere in the world. Once that website is launched, nobody knows that it exists, and it really takes a lot of work to get people to find your website. Expecting that you’re going to launch a website and automatically have people finding it is sort of like opening a new business, printing up a whole bunch of business cards, and sitting at your new desk with your business cards waiting for people to show up. It’s just not going to happen. At a minimum, you need a sign out on the street that says what kind of business you’re in so that people can walk in.

But more than that, when you launch a new business, most people understand that you need some advertising. You need to send out some flyers and maybe need to make some phone calls. You want to do something to get people to learn about your new business and come and seek you out.

Well, this is also true with your website. Your website is a great way to get people to find you, but once the site is launched, it does take a fair amount of effort to get it found by the people who are likely to become your best customers. In fact, the effort involved in getting your website found by the right people is usually a lot greater than the effort in getting your website built and launched in the first place.

When we’re sitting down with new clients working on their web design, one of the things that we do differently from many other designers is figure out the long-term strategy for how their website is going to grow their business so that this strategy can actually be incorporated into the design process. But even when your site is already built and launched, you can always go back and develop a plan for getting your site found and for making the site effective as your number 1 employee.

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